If modern adulthood has taught us anything, it’s that a reliable car is less a status symbol and more a hard-won badge of survival, especially if you’ve had to eat more ramen than you care to admit to get those monthly payments squared away. 

Meet Lena, this family’s undisputed champion of vehicular destruction, who’s racked up more insurance horror stories than actual payslips in the last three years. With a resume built on job-hopping and joyriding, Lena’s latest scheme is to borrow her cousin’s brand-new SUV for exactly one evening: the sacred, image-defining ritual of impressing her «high-profile» party friends.

See, public transport is apparently for the classless, the forgotten, and the not-Lena crowd. As she so graciously put it, the thought of arriving at a suburban cocktail night by bus is social kamikaze, never mind that it’s only twenty minutes away and that, statistically, she’s more likely to arrive in style if she’s not behind the wheel. Her argument relies on the time-honored tradition of «your property, my entitlement,» seasoned with a healthy dash of «you just don’t get the rich kid hustle.»

After politely declining—because, shockingly, her cousin isn’t lining up to add her SUV to Lena’s growing collection of totaled vehicles, Lena accuses her of mockery.

I, for one, kind of hope Lena’s at least half right and her cousin is mocking her, not for riding the bus, but for thinking «borrowing» equals «handing over the keys to your life savings so I can impress a group of people who wouldn’t recognize me on foot.